SimCity’s gorgeous urban landscapes
Reviewing the new SimCity in last week’s issue, Metro Weekly video game critic (and regular Technocrat contributor) Rhuaridh Marr raves about the look of the game — and for good reason: Its detail, as he notes, is “astonishing,” as is its general visual aesthetic. He writes:
SimCity is gorgeous. Skyscrapers gleam in the morning sun, casting dark shadows over their neighborhood, factories belch out thick clouds of smoke and pollution, roads clog with traffic as Sims go about their daily business, oil wells churn and pump as they suck up the earth’s content, the grade school kids throng in the yard, playing games and running after each other. Zoom out, and the city lives and breathes, as traffic darts through the veins of streets, wind blows pollution between the buildings, water flows, windmills turn, buildings illuminate at night, fires left unattended grow from tiny smokestacks into raging infernos, trash builds up outside residences and buildings crumble as they are demolished. SimCity is crammed with a seemingly infinite number of things to see, with every building granted its own graphical idiosyncrasies, and it all gelling into one cohesive, constantly delighting whole.
For artwork to go with his review, Rhuaridh screen-grabbed actual gameplay. Ultimately, we only had space for one image, but it left us with 15 more that were eye-boggling in their own right. We thought it a shame to delete them without letting you have a look. So here, then, are some of Rhuaridh’s urban landscapes. Enjoy.
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